Atomic Design

Brad Frost

Let’s quickly review what establishing design direction looks like across disciplines: UX designers can create lo-fi sketches to establish basic information architecture and some anticipated UI patterns. Visual designers can gather the teams’aesthetic values by conducting a 20-second gut test exercise, then create style tiles and element collages to explore initial design directions. Frontend developers can set up project dependencies, stub out basic templates, and write structural markup for patterns the team anticipates using in the project. This work can happen concurrently but shouldn’t happen in isolation. Sure, there will need to be some initial head-down time for each discipline to get set up, but all team members should be fully aware of each discipline’s explorations in anticipation of working together to evolve these ideas.